Early modern female book ownership is a relatively new field of scholarly interest, but that interest has been growing in recent years. Below are resources both on book ownership and on women and book history more generally. Feel free to contact us with more suggestions for works that should be included.
Acheson, Katherine, editor. Early Modern English Marginalia: Material Readings in Early Modern Culture. Routledge, 2018. Essential collection of essays with an extremely useful introduction.
Annotated Books Online, a database of early books with marginalia and “a virtual research environment for scholars and students interested in historical reading practices.”
August, Hannah. Playbooks and Their Readers in Early Modern England. Routledge, 2022. Overview of evidence found for reading habits of plays, with a section on women’s marginalia.
Babcock, Robert G. et al. A Book of Her Own: An Exhibition of Manuscripts and Printed Books in the Yale University Library That Were Owned by Women Before 1700. Beinecke, 2005. Contains list of books in the Yale University Library with evidence of female book ownership and essays on the topic.
Alex Wingate’s Bibliotecas Privadas de Navarra websites with inventories of books owned by Spanish women, with websites devoted to Mariana Vicenta de Echeverri, Ana de Sarasa, and Maria de Ceniceros.
Birt, Sarah. “Mary Marsden #HerBook,” post on an example of early modern female book ownership on the blog A Fashionable Business, https://afashionablebusiness.wordpress.com/2020/03/08/mary-marsden-herbook/.
Center for Editing Lives and Letters (CELL)’s database Book Owners Online, a fantastic new resource for provenance research that includes many women. To filter by women, click here.
Bowden, Caroline. “Building Libraries in Exile: The English Convents and Their Book Collections in the Seventeenth Century.” British Catholic History, volume 32, number 3, 2015, pp. 343–82.
Bowden, Caroline. “The Library of Mildred Cooke Cecil, Lady Burghley.” The Library volume 6, number 1, 2005, pp. 3–29.
Brayman Hackel, Heidi. Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy. Cambridge University Press, 2009. Contains a chapter on women readers.
Brayman Hackel, Heidi, and Catherine E. Kelly, editors. Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Essays with different approaches to questions of female readership.
British Armorial Bindings Database, by John Morris and the University of Toronto. Allows for searching for owners and the stamps they placed on bookbindings.
The British Library’s Database of Bookbindings enables looking for ownership based on individualized bindings.
The British Library also has a useful Guide to Researching Provenance online.
Broomhall, Susan. Women and the Book Trade in Sixteenth-Century France. Ashgate/Routledge, 2002. Contains a chapter on women readers and ownership marks.
Cambers, Andrew. Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript, and Puritanism in England, 1580-1720. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Cambers, Andrew. “Readers’ Marks and Religious Practice: Margaret Hoby’s Marginalia.” Tudor Books and Readers: Materiality and the Construction of Meaning, edited by John N. King, Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 211–31.
CERL’s Material Evidence in Incunabula (MEI), a database “specifically designed to record and search the material evidence (or copy specific, post-production evidence and provenance information) of 15th-century printed books: ownership, decoration, binding, manuscript annotations, stamps, prices, etc.” A search for the phrase “gender:1001” retrieves all female owners of incunabula that have been recorded in either the main MEI database of individual copies or the database of owners. The search may be limited to women owners active before 1800.
Crawford, Julie. “Reconsidering Early Modern Women’s Reading, or, How Margaret Hoby Read Her Mornay.” Huntington Library Quarterly, volume 73, number 2, 2010, 193–223.
Cruz, Anne J., and Rosilie Hernández, editors. Women’s Literacy in Early Modern Spain and the New World. Ashgate, 2011; Routledge, 2016. Includes several essays on women’s reading habits and libraries.
Early Book Owners in Britain (EBOB), a searchable database of early book ownership from 1450-1550.
Early English Playbooks, a section of archive.org that contains digitized playbooks from the Boston Public Library. A source for a small number of female-owned books.
Early Modern Hands (1450-1700). Website by Guillaume Coatlen featuring numerous examples of early modern handwriting that can help date marginalia.
Early Modern Marginalia Research Network. Website by Kathy Acheson and Blaze Welling, featuring Signature, a blog with posts and interviews on marginalia, and Bookmark, a peer-to-peer tool with which researchers can help each other with images of marginalia.
The website Frances Wolfreston Hor Bouks by Sarah Lindenbaum aims to list all books that belonged to Frances Wolfreston (1607-1677).
The website of the Grollier Club and its Vimeo page, which features videos of events such as the symposium Women in the Book Arts, held in January 2020.
The blog of the library of Innerpeffray features a post on Women Borrowers in the 18th century with examples of the kinds of books women read. “Meet the Borrowers: Innerpeffray’s 18th Century Women,” posted 10 November 2020.
Jackson, H. J. Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. Yale University Press, 2001. General book on marginalia ranging to the modern period.
Knight, Leah, Micheline White, and Elizabeth Saur, editors. Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain. University of Michigan Press, 2018. Collection of essays on female book ownership “rediscovering and reframing the rich and multifaceted history of early modern British women’s book ownership and library compilation.” Essays by numerous scholars, including Micheline White, Mark Empey, and Sarah Lindenbaum on the topic of women’s libraries and reading.
Lindenbaum, Sarah. Written in the Margent: Frances Wolfreston Revealed. Blog post on The Collation: Research and Exploration at the Folger, June 2018.
Marginalia and the Early Modern Woman Writer, 1530-1660, multifaceted project headed by Jake Arthur and Rosalind Smith; includes a blog, publications, and the database Early Modern Women’s Marginalia.
McCarthy, Erin A. Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public in Early Modern England. Oxford University Press, 2020.
McCarthy, Erin A. “Reading Women Reading Donne in Manuscript and Printed Miscellanies: A Quantitative Approach.” The Review of English Studies, volume 69, 2018, pp. 661–685. https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgy018) doi.org/10.1093/res/hg….
McKitterick, David. “Women and Their Books in Seventeenth- Century England: The Case of Elizabeth Puckering.” Library, 7th series, volume 1, number 4, 2000, pp. 359–80.
MCRS Rare Books Blog, from the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies, with blog posts that sometimes feature women and female ownership.
Molekamp, Femke. Women and the Bible in Early Modern England: Religious Reading and Writing. Oxford University Press, 2013.
Narveson, Kate. Bible Readers and Lay Writers in Early Modern England: Gender and Self-Definition in an Emergent Writing Culture. Ashgate/Routledge, 2012.
Pearse, Michael. “Four seventeenth-century inventories of Donibristle House, Fife.” Retrieved from his page on academia.edu, December 2018. Lists books owned by several women.
Pearson, David. Book Ownership in Stuart England. Lyell Lectures in Bibliography. Contains a chapter on women. Oxford University Press, 2021.
Pearson, David. English Book Owners in the Seventeenth Century, database that includes among its listings a number of female book owners.
Pearson, David. Provenance Research in Book History: A Handbook. Revised edition. Bodleian Library, 2019.
The Perdita Project catalogs female-authored manuscripts in the free version. The paid version includes digital facsimiles.
The websites of the Philadelphia Rare Books and Manuscripts Company (PRB&M) features illustrations and information and special website catalogues devoted to women and to provenance.
Potten, Edward. “The Library and Commonplace Books of Mary Booth of Dunham Massey.” The Library volume 23, number 4, 2022, pp. 399–421.
Private Libraries in Renaissance England (PLRE), edited by Joseph L. Black and sponsored by the Folger Library, enables searching for women’s book collections.
The Provenance Online Project (POP), edited by Laura Aydelotte, from the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania, includes a Flickr feed with images.
The RECIRC project, which studies reception and circulation of writing by women, includes a component on book ownership. See for instance, Bronagh McShane, “Inscriptions in the Galway Dominican Convent Library Collection,” posted August 10, 2017.
Richards, Jennifer, and Fred Schurink, editors. “The Textuality and Materiality of Reading in Early Modern England.” Special Issue of Huntington Library Quarterly volume 73, number 3, 2010. With an excellent introduction and fascinating essays, including by Jason Scott Warren, Wendy Wall, Helen Smith, and others.
Sae, Kitamura. “A Shakespeare of One’s Own: Female Users of Playbooks from the Seventeenth to the Mid-Eighteenth Century.” Palgrave Communications 3 (2017): 1–9. https://dx.doi.org/10.1057/palcomms.2017.21.
Satterley, Renae. “Rare Book of the Month: July 2019,” a post on a book donated by Katherine Wyndsor on the Middle Temple Library blog. https://middletemplelibrary.wordpress.com/2019/07/30/rare-book-of-the-month-july-2019/
Satterley, Renae. “Rare Book of the Month: August 2019,” a post on a book printed by a woman on the Middle Temple Library blog. https://middletemplelibrary.wordpress.com/2019/09/11/rare-book-of-the-month-august-2019/
Satterley, Renae. “Rare Book of the Month: October 2019,” a post on a book owned by Anne Prowtingon the Middle Temple Library blog. https://middletemplelibrary.wordpress.com/2019/10/23/rare-book-of-the-month-october-2019/
“Books and Reading in Shakespeare’s England,” a podcast in the Shakespeare Unlimited series produced by the Folger Shakespeare Library, with Jason Scott Warren and Stuart Kells. The program concentrates on male readers but provides useful information on how people used and read books.
Sherman, William H. Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Contains a chapter on women readers and the “matriarchive.”
Smith, Helen. “Grossly Material Things”: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England. Oxford University Press, 2012. Contains a chapter on women as readers of books.
Smith, Rosalind. “Le Pouvoir de faire dire: Marginalia in Mary Queen of Scots’ Book of Hours.” Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing, edited by Patricia Pender and Rosalind Smith, Palgrave, 2014, pp. 55–75.
Smith, Rosalind. “Paratextual Marginalia, Early Modern Women, and Collaboration.” Gender, Authorship, and Early Modern Women’s Collaboration, edited by Patricia Pender, Palgrave, 2017, pp. 175–200.
Snook, Edith. Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England. Ashgate, 2005.
Sutherland, Catherine. “Lady Damaris Masham,” a post on books by Masham, owned by Astell, for Magdalene College Libraries blog. https://magdlibs.com/2020/03/06/lady-damaris-masham/
Sutherland, Catherine, “Mary Astell,” a post on books owned by Astell for Magdalene College Libraries blog. https://magdlibs.com/2019/03/08/mary-astell/
A blog post on Catherine Sutherland’s discoveries of Astell ownership: Tom Almeroth Williams, “Ahead of her time: Magdalen College Cambridge has discovered a treasure trove of women’s intellectual history.” https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/mary-astell-collection-magdalene-college
UK RED, the Reading Experience Database, which allows searching for evidence of readership and limiting by time period and gender.
Wayne, Valerie, editor. Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England. Bloomsbury, 2020. Includes several chapters on women’s book ownership, including essays by Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich, Lori Newcomb, and Georgianna Ziegler.
West, Susie. “Rare Books and Rare Women: Gender and Private Libraries 1660-1830,” in Gendering Library History, edited by E. Kerslake and N. Moody. John Moores University, 2000. 179-95.
White, Eric. “Rare book working group examines ‘Her Book’,” Notabilia, October 2018. Information on working group at Princeton looking at evidence of female book ownership in the holdings of the Princeton University Library.
Wolfe, Heather. Uncancelling the Cancelled: Recovering Obliterated Owners of Old Books. Blog post on The Collation: Research and Exploration at the Folger. April 2019.
Wolfe, Heather. “Reading Bells and Loose Papers: Reading and Writing Practices of the English Benedictine Nuns of Cambrai and Paris.” Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing, edited by Victoria E. Burke and Jonathan Gibson, Ashgate, 2004. 135–56.
Women’s Book History: a full bibliography of all works related to women and book history, compiled by Cait Coker and Kate Ozment.
Ziegler, Georgianna. Early Modern Women Buying Books: The Evidence. Blog post on The Collation: Research and Exploration at the Folger. June 2020.
Ziegler, Georgianna. What Were Women Reading? A Dive into the Folger Vault. Shakespeare and Beyond blog, produced by the Folger. January 2020.
Ziegler, Georgianna. Women Marking the Text. Blog post on The Collation: Research and Exploration at the Folger. February 2012.
Early Modern Female Book Ownership 